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Pool party was a success!
Aug. 6th, 2006 05:16 pmHonestly. If you had asked were there less likely people to wind up in a ranch house in the suburbs, with a swimming pool in the back yard, I would have told you no. But here we are. And it's not so bad at all. It's helped, of course, that we are maybe 7 minutes from the downtown of a big city - not so terribly suburban as where I grew up, which was Levittown, NY, which I left the minute I was able to and swore never to go back. Catonsville is way less suburb-y than that. Although this little ranch house is suspiciously similar in layout to a Levitt house... ("Little boxes, on the hillside, and they're all made of ticky-tacky...")
So we had the pool party yesterday. Part of the point of moving up here was to be closer to my family, and see more of them. And yesterday's party was family time! My youngest sister (who lives in PA) and her spouse and their 5 kids, my youngest brother (who lives right next to DC) and his spouse and their infant daughter, and one of my nephews who is staying with said brother for the summer - he returns to college next week, but he's been doing an internship in DC for the summer - and my dad and stepmother, who used to live in Maine but who just moved to DE this spring, so they're only 90 minutes away. At least, only 90 minutes when there's not an intense traffic jam on the Bay Bridge.
And a good time was had by all. Not only the kids, but several of the adults, spent a couple hours in the water. BIL Joe managed to do a running vault into the pool, over the 3.5 foot wall, which makes an impressive splash. My inflatable 4-foot long stegosaurus* was not as big a hit as I had hoped; the younger kids were scared of it. There were a couple of pool toys we never even got around to using. And the screen tent worked quite well for eating in, and the sweet corn was yummy, and the cobbler was a hit, as were the garlic portobello burgers - I'll go back to the supermarket and get the brand name of those, they were way good, and even the non-vegetarians liked them. (The salmon patties were not so popular; the leftover salmon mix will get turned into salmon loaf for tonight's supper.)
Now there is a certain amount of cleaning up to do. All in all, a success - when people don't leave till nearly 11 at night even though they have little kids and started talking about trying to get on the road before dark, one presumes they were enjoying themselves. Our house will never pass for normal, cluttered as it is with pets and books and musical instruments, and I worry some about whether my relatively normal family members, the ones who have furniture that doesn't have cat hair, and walls that aren't completely walled off by bookshelves, and dining tables that people can eat on rather than using it as the location for the laptop computers and the computer accessories, would find our house a bit too messy and fuzzy. But apparently we faked it well enough that no one was horrified.
And the fuzzy parts were a hit, too. My 3-year-old and 5-year-old nieces were not scared of the critters (the way a recent 5-year-old visitor was), and enjoyed feeding them carrots and rose hips and dried cranberries. The 12-year-old got to hold the chinchillas and help me give them their evening dust bath. (If you have never seen a chinchilla take a dust bath, you are missing one of the funnier things around!) My sister got a big kick out of the part of my stuffed animal collection that consists of Giant Microbes (see the link at right; every science geek should own some!) - she still has a pretty huge part of her stuffed animal collection, too.
We didn't get around to looking at my whole kaleidoscope collection (one of the few things in the house that isn't a bookshelf is the curio cabinet full of kaleidoscopes, some made by yours truly) but my 9-year-old nephew expressed an interest, so that's for next time. I had given him a cheapo kaleidoscope kit last year, and he may be interested in learning more about building kaleidoscopes from scratch.
Anyway, when I finally kick the bucket, there will be people who look back and say "remember that great party we had at ____'s house?" which is the best kind of immortality.
*The stegosaurus was purchased over 20 years ago, I think from The Nature Store, and I have no idea whether they're still available.
So we had the pool party yesterday. Part of the point of moving up here was to be closer to my family, and see more of them. And yesterday's party was family time! My youngest sister (who lives in PA) and her spouse and their 5 kids, my youngest brother (who lives right next to DC) and his spouse and their infant daughter, and one of my nephews who is staying with said brother for the summer - he returns to college next week, but he's been doing an internship in DC for the summer - and my dad and stepmother, who used to live in Maine but who just moved to DE this spring, so they're only 90 minutes away. At least, only 90 minutes when there's not an intense traffic jam on the Bay Bridge.
And a good time was had by all. Not only the kids, but several of the adults, spent a couple hours in the water. BIL Joe managed to do a running vault into the pool, over the 3.5 foot wall, which makes an impressive splash. My inflatable 4-foot long stegosaurus* was not as big a hit as I had hoped; the younger kids were scared of it. There were a couple of pool toys we never even got around to using. And the screen tent worked quite well for eating in, and the sweet corn was yummy, and the cobbler was a hit, as were the garlic portobello burgers - I'll go back to the supermarket and get the brand name of those, they were way good, and even the non-vegetarians liked them. (The salmon patties were not so popular; the leftover salmon mix will get turned into salmon loaf for tonight's supper.)
Now there is a certain amount of cleaning up to do. All in all, a success - when people don't leave till nearly 11 at night even though they have little kids and started talking about trying to get on the road before dark, one presumes they were enjoying themselves. Our house will never pass for normal, cluttered as it is with pets and books and musical instruments, and I worry some about whether my relatively normal family members, the ones who have furniture that doesn't have cat hair, and walls that aren't completely walled off by bookshelves, and dining tables that people can eat on rather than using it as the location for the laptop computers and the computer accessories, would find our house a bit too messy and fuzzy. But apparently we faked it well enough that no one was horrified.
And the fuzzy parts were a hit, too. My 3-year-old and 5-year-old nieces were not scared of the critters (the way a recent 5-year-old visitor was), and enjoyed feeding them carrots and rose hips and dried cranberries. The 12-year-old got to hold the chinchillas and help me give them their evening dust bath. (If you have never seen a chinchilla take a dust bath, you are missing one of the funnier things around!) My sister got a big kick out of the part of my stuffed animal collection that consists of Giant Microbes (see the link at right; every science geek should own some!) - she still has a pretty huge part of her stuffed animal collection, too.
We didn't get around to looking at my whole kaleidoscope collection (one of the few things in the house that isn't a bookshelf is the curio cabinet full of kaleidoscopes, some made by yours truly) but my 9-year-old nephew expressed an interest, so that's for next time. I had given him a cheapo kaleidoscope kit last year, and he may be interested in learning more about building kaleidoscopes from scratch.
Anyway, when I finally kick the bucket, there will be people who look back and say "remember that great party we had at ____'s house?" which is the best kind of immortality.
*The stegosaurus was purchased over 20 years ago, I think from The Nature Store, and I have no idea whether they're still available.
